A Start-Up Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. Then Patients Began Dying.
Last year, Ms. Hudlow and her terminally ill husband, David, were lured to the tropical island of Antigua by a California start-up called ExThera Medical, which claimed that its novel blood-filtering device could remove cancer cells from a patient’s bloodstream and extend his life. However, their desperation for a cure led to disastrous consequences.
Mr. Hudlow, who suffered from late-stage esophageal cancer, traveled to Antigua with Ms. Hudlow after a doctor advised him that ExThera’s device was a last hope to save his life. On April 10, they flew out of Antigua, only to return on the same plane for Mr. Hudlow’s terminal care at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, where he succumbed to his illness on April 18.
ExThera and its secretive billionaire partner, Alan Quasha’s private equity firm, Quadrant Management, pitched the blood filtering as a panacea, promoting it with dramatic claims about curing cancer patients from around the world. They drew patients to the island by selling thousands of filter devices at a cost of $45,000 per treatment session, claiming an extraordinary cure rate based on an unconvincing study involving only 12 patients in Croatia.
Despite no published data on the device, ExThera and Quadrant convinced numerous American cancer patients and their families, including Ms. Hudlow’s, to make the expensive journey to Antigua for the costly treatments. This led to heart-wrenching consequences: by the end of the summer, at least five patients, including Mr. Hudlow and three others mentioned, had died from their cancers and related complications shortly after the blood filtering.
It is unknown what impact the devices had on individual patients’ prognoses, given the numerous mitigating factors present in these dire cases. Several patients experienced relapses and progressions in their cancers following their treatments. Another patient’s survival was initially cited as an exceptional case, though his wife suspects the filter acceleration of his demise.
Quadrant continued the treatments despite requests from medical officials to shut the operation down for violating patient protection laws and compromising medical standards of care. On February 6, a pharmaceutical executive from the company sent ExThera CEO a strongly-worded email protesting the lack of transparency, emphasizing the experiment they were running by using a new device without medical approval or even a comprehensive set of results supporting its effectiveness for cancer patients, and warned: “Please remove the ‘curative’ implications from the script and only continue to support existing patients under clinical trial guidance as per regulatory approved protocols.” These warnings fell on deaf ears; ExThera and Quadrant continued operating through the spring season.
Despite assurances from Quasha that patients still opted for filter treatments without consultation from him and Quadrant (and they knew the experimental, unapproved aspect of it!), the desperation driven by the companies might have inadvertently speeded the natural progression of this cancer and resulted in some…